Now
Available from
CounterPunch for Only $11.50 (S/H Included)
Today's
Stories
February 28 / 29, 2004
Stephen Green
Serving Two Flags: Neo-Cons, Israel
and the Bush Team
Mike Whitney
Dismantle
the Military Goliath
February 27, 2004
Thomas C. Mountain
A
White Jesus During Black History Month?
Laura Carlsen
Americans
Abroad: Bush is Persona Non Grata
John B. Anderson
Nader's Campaign Brings Back Memories: Creating an Open Electoral
Process
Jason Leopold
Spying
on Kofi Annan
John Chuckman
Nader,
Risk and Hope
Standard Schaefer
An
Interview with Michael Hudson on Putin's Russia
Ray McGovern
Punished
for Honest Intelligence
Saul Landau
The
Haiti Redux
Website of the Day
Bush: Why I'm Running for Re-election
February 26, 2004
Brandy Baker
Is Nader
on to Something?
Jacques Kinau
AEI
to Colombia: "Can't Give You Anything But Guns, Baby"
Norman Solomon
Bugging Kofi Annan: UN Spying
and the Evasions of US Journalism
Greg Weiher
A Purloined Letter: the Zarqawi Gambit
Walt Brasch
Janet Jackson, Bush & No. 542: There are No Halftime Shows
in War
Shadi Hamid
The Music World Explodes in Anger
Norman Madarasz
As Canadian as Corruption
Chris Floyd
Bullets and Ballots
Virginia Tilly
The
Deeper Meaning of the Wall
Amy Goodman / Jeremy
Scahill
Haiti's
Lawyer Says US is Arming Haiti's Anti-Aristide Paramilitaries
Website of the Day
Clear Channel Sucks
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
February 19, 2004
Cecilie Surasky
Anti-Semitism
at the World Social Forum? That's Not What I Saw
Ray McGovern
Iraq
Hawks and Deceptive Intelligence: Did They Really Think They'd
Get Away With It?
Tariq Ali
How Far
Will Bush Go in Iraq?
Ralph Nader
Whither
the Nation?
Wayne Madsen
Would Kerry Purge the Neo-Cons?
Norman Solomon
The Collapse of Dean's Cyber-Bubble
Christopher Brauchli
Cheney, Halliburton and the NYT
Mike Whitney
Bush's Iraq Strategy: "I Hope They Kill Each Other"
Lewis Carroll
Bush the Mighty Helmsman from Yale
Website of the Day
Sex Toy Horoscope
February 18, 2004
William Wilgus
Bush:
AWOL and Dereliction of Duty
William Blum
Mush-Minded
Liberals
Dave Lindorff
Bush's China Syndrome
Greg Weiher
Why
is Kerry Getting a Pass?
Mike Griffin
Killing the Messenger: the AFL-CIO's Attack on Harry Kelber
Mark Hand
Kerry Tells Peace Movement to "Move On"
February 17, 2004
Mike Ferner
The
Countryside Murders in Iraq
Mokhiber / Weissman
Corporation
as Psychopath
Marjorie Cohn
DrakeGate:
a Victory for Free Speech
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's
Endgame: a Review of Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire"
Greg Bates
Nader Ambush: a New Low for The
Nation
Ximena Ortiz
A Bush
Doctrine, of Sorts
Gary Leupp
Whatever Happened to Gen. Khazraji?
Sen. John Kerry
"The Cause of Israel is the Cause of America"
Steve Perry
Kerry
1, Drudge 0
February 16, 2004
James Johnston
Huddling
with the Cheeseheads in a NASCAR World
Sara Eltantawi
To
Wear the Hijab or Not
Bruce Anderson
Kevin
Cooper and the Midnight Needle
Elaine Cassel
Feds
on Campus: the Drake Subpoenas
Rahul Mahajan
Bush,
Is the Tide Finally Turning?
Kevin Cooper
The Ritual of Death
Stan Cox
Goodbye, Howard Dean
Larry David
My War
Steve Perry
Bush and the Guard: the Cover-Up's the Thing
Website of the Day
Prison Patriots: Help This Vital Film Get Made
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
Weekend
Edition
February 28 / 29, 2004
14 Answers
An
Open Letter to Naderites
By BRUCE JACKSON
An Open letter to the 94 people who
have thus far written me to express displeasure with my
article about Ralph Nader's announcement on "Meet the
Press" that he was again running as an independent candidate
for president
First: Please forgive the impersonality
of this group mailing. If I responded to each and every one of
you individually I'd have no time to write about other mischief
being perpetrated by other public figures this week. It's just
a matter of temporal economy.
Second: Several of you objected to my
saying that Ralph Nader was "every bit as evil as George
W. Bush." My wife objected to my saying that Ralph Nader
was every bit as evil as George W. Bush. You're right and she's
right: Ralph Nader is not every bit as evil as George W. Bush.
"Evil," as one writer put it, "is a religious
term and has no place in American politics." Ralph Nader
never killed anybody (though he did help make it possible for
George W. Bush to kill people, as did millions of other American
voters). I changed that phrase so the sentence in which it appeared
now reads "He's as destructively righteous and tunnel-visioned
as George W. Bush, the man he--as much as Justices Scalia, O'Connor,
Thomas, Rehnquist and Kennedy--helped make president of the United
States." I hope we can all rest comfortably with that.
Third: Many of you wrote (some of you
in great detail) about the many good and useful works Ralph Nader
has done in the past, and several of you said that his good work
then justifies any harm he might do now. That's one moral economy.
Another moral economy says that each good and bad deed gets its
own evaluation, that you cannot bank good deeds earlier to neutralize
bad deeds you're going to do later. Lots of lawyers have tried
the first of those two moral economies on juries in cases of
Boy Scout leaders and priests who went astray with trusting little
boys or that swell guy who everybody likes who just had a bad
day and therefore hacked up his wife or shot up the office. Usually,
it doesn't work. When it does, just about everybody except the
defendant gets pissed off.
Fourth: Many of you wrote that it is
important to teach the Democratic party a lesson. I'm a teacher
so I think it's important to teach everybody a lesson whenever
teaching a lesson is appropriate and useful. The only question
is, what lesson and at what cost? I remember hearing that line--"It's
important to teach the Democratic party a lesson"--a lot
in the 2000 presidential election. That is the election, you
might recall, which gave us George W. Bush as president of the
United States. Dennis Kucinch is trying to teach the Democratic
party a lesson from the inside; that's one way to teach the Democratic
party a lesson. Ralph Nader likes to do it from outside; that's
his way. Me, after more than 40 years as a teacher, I think teaching
lessons isn't always the most important thing you can do with
your time and effort. Like now. Now, I think the single most
important thing we can do with our time and effort is get George
W. Bush and his neocon thugs out of the White House, Pentagon,
Justice Department and everyplace else, and that anything that
gets in the way of that task is a distraction. Lessons and distractions
are different things. Not to say that the Democratic party doesn't
need to be taught a lesson or a lot of lessons. But if the price
of that lesson is pain and suffering for millions of people who
might not otherwise suffer that pain and suffering, then it's
a lousy pedagogical economy.
Fifth: Eight of you said I was a Nazi
and/or a fascist. I don't have anything to say to you because
you are dummkopfs.
Sixth: Seven of you spelled Ralph Nader's
name with no e. His name is "Nader" not "Nadar."
Nadar was Gaspard Felix-Tournachon, who was born in 1820. He
was, says the Encyclopedia of Photography, "not only among
the greatest photographers of the 19th c., but was one of the
great personalities of his age. Caricaturist, journalist, novelist,
balloonist, propagandist for heavier-than-air flight, friend
of almost every notable French writer, artist, journalist, and
socialist of the Second Empire (many of whom he photographed),
Nadar was a paragon of enthusiasm, energy, and productivity."
He would probably make an interesting candidate for president
of the United States but that is impossible for two reasons.
One reason is he was not a natural-born citizen of the US, and
the US Constitution prohibits anyone who is not a natural-born
citizen from running for the office of president. (The terminally
oleaginous Utah Senator Orrin Hatch recently introduced an amendment
that would make it possible for foreigners who have lived in
the US 20 years to run for president. He picked 20 years because
that is how long his friend the former weightlifter and actor
Arnold Schwartzenegger has been living in the US.) The second
reason Nadar is not running is that he died in 1910.
Seventh: One of you sent a letter with
no body but with a Subject line that went "You're an idiot.
Your argument is bankrupt. You are a poor writer. Fuck off!"
Thank you for your brevity.
Eighth: Half of you told me that Al Gore
ran a lousy campaign and that he was gutless and made of wood
etc. I couldn't agree with you more. He did and he was. Maybe
25% of you said that the Republicans had stacked the Florida
vote by depriving a huge portion of Democrats the right to vote
by improperly excluding them from the voting rolls. I couldn't
agree with you more. They did exactly that. Maybe 15% of you
said that the Supreme Court handed Bush an election he didn't
really win. I couldn't agree with you more. They did.
So what? Al Gore couldn't be better than
the lump of wood he was, but he was still better than George
W. Bush. No Democrat could do anything about Republican chicanery
in Florida or the cynicism of the US Supreme Court. Those Republican
appointees were going to do what they could do to get their man
into the White House and they were successful. But they were
successful only because all the other pieces were in place, and
their margin was razor-thin. Ralph Nader had a choice and he
not only could have made a difference but he knew it. By election
day, everyone knew Florida was going to be close. Many of his
supporters across the country were urging him to let Florida
go, to tell the faithful down there that there were, at that
moment, bigger issues at stake. Florida was about whether he
was going to go for the country or for himself. Do you really
think he looked in the mirror and opted for the country? Look
at what has happened in the world the past three years and the
role the US has played in the world. Was Nader a good teacher?
Was his lesson plan a good lesson plan?
A letter-writer who thought I'd gone
too far with the "evil" comparison but was pretty much
okay with the rest of it pointed out that by stepping outside
of ego in Florida Nader could have given the Greens significant
political clout and thereby helped all those environmental and
many other causes that the Bushites hold in such contempt. Several
of his closest advisers and friends urged Nader to do exactly
that, but Nader wouldn't budge. "This to me is the problem
with Nader," she wrote, "his absolutism and narcissism,
invaluable traits in a crusader and destructive in a political
candidate. He cannot be faulted for running; that's his democratic
(small 'd') right. But he can be faulted for arriving at a point
when the race was nearly tied, and not taking advantage of that
position to USE THAT POWER to get as much as 30-40% of his 'principles'
actually accomplished (more than ever before in history) by making
a deal with Gore as he stepped into the presidency with Nader's
crucial help. Nader could have done it and moved the nation forward
in the most wonderful way. But he did not do it because of his
personality, his stubbornness and his emotionalism. (Maybe Gore
would have been just as stubborn on the other end, we don't know)."
Ninth: Several of you said that by criticizing
Ralph Nader I was depriving you of the right to vote. I think
you may be a little fuzzy in your understanding of free speech
and the right to vote and how they relate to and are distinct
from one another. My telling you my opinion does not interfere
with your right to vote. No matter what I or anybody else says
about any political candidate, you can vote for whomever you
wish, so long as they're on the ballot or there's a write-in
slot. Really. If you don't trust me on this, ask anybody.
Tenth: It's okay that you don't agree
with me and that I don't agree with you. That's what America
is all about, or should be. That's why it's important to get
rid of people like John Ashcroft, for whom the Bill of Rights
(which is the charter that protects arguments like these) is
anathema. People who would permit only one ideological line to
the exclusion of all others are bad people. I'd even say evil
people, but I'm skittish about that word just now. They're also
boring.
Eleventh: Several letter-writers complained
about or were puzzled by my references to the Vietnamese monks
and American Quaker who set themselves afire to protest the Vietnam
War. I forgot that there are fewer and fewer of us involved in
politics now who remember those years. Those public immolations
were, at the time, acts of astonishing self-sacrifice for principle,
for the good of others. They galavanized a huge amount of public
opinion against the war. The death of the Quaker is the only
act of anti-war protest I remember Robert S. McNamara referring
to in Errol Morris's recent documentary The Fog of War. Those
protests by fire seemed to me about as far from Ralph Nader's
relentless narcissism as a person of conscience might get. That's
what that was about. I didn't mean he should actually do it.
But it would be good if he understood it.
Twelfth: After reading all your letters
(and the letters from the good folks who agreed with me 100%,
of which there were also a considerable number), I reread what
I wrote about Ralph Nader's announcement on "Meet the Press"
that he was once again running as an independent candidate for
president of the United States. Except for the one change I mentioned
in Two above, I wouldn't change a word of it.
Thirteenth: Thanks for writing. The only
articles I've ever written that brought in this much mail were
"Killing a Tree,"
which was about a neighbor who needlessly slaughtered a 300-year-old
oak (all those letters agreed with me about what a brute he was),
and "Jews Like Us, "
in which I argued the assumption that all or even the large majority
of American Jews endorsed the abominations of the Sharonistas
and squatters (response to that was split between Jews who agreed
and Jews who called me a self-hating-Jew, plus three dolts who
assumed that because I criticized Israel and Sharon and my last
name is Jackson, I was an anti-semitic goon like them).
Fourteenth: in November, vote, and when
you vote please do everything you can to avoid distractions.
A good deal rides on it.
Peace,
Bruce Jackson
Bruce Jackson,
SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor
of American Culture at University at Buffalo, edits the web journal
BuffaloReport.com.
His most recent book is Emile
de Antonio in Buffalo (Center Working Papers). Jackson
is also a contributor to The
Politics of Anti-Semitism. He can be reached at: bjackson@buffalo.edu
Weekend
Edition Features for February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
Keep
CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|